Why You Should Consider Hiring an Email Marketing Agency

Email marketing is a great way to get the most out of your online marketing efforts. It’s been an effective way to build relationships, drive leads and sales and maximize the profitability of your marketing campaigns for over 40 years. And, with an average ROI of 38x, it’s pretty hard to beat.

However, creating an implementing an effective email marketing strategy can be a lot of work. Not only do you have to write tons of emails, you have to understand all kinds of different aspects of email marketing, like timing, how to build and maintain your subscriber list(s), where and how to use drips and so much more.

For many time and resource-strapped businesses, this can make it almost impossible to give their email marketing strategy the time and attention it needs to deliver great results. That’s where hiring an email marketing agency can be a great option to consider.

When you don’t have time, experience or the necessary resources to make email marketing work, you may be tempted to simply avoid getting into email marketing. And, you aren’t alone. That same concern keeps 44% of companies from investing in email marketing.

That’s a real shame, though, because email marketing can be one of the best online marketing investments you can make. So, if you’re struggling to make your email marketing work, don’t feel like you have the time to keep managing your email marketing or have simply been avoiding email marketing because you don’t have the time to figure it out, you may want to consider hiring an email marketing agency.

With all of that in mind, let’s take a look at email marketing, why you should be excited to invest in it and why you might want to hire an email marketing agency to help you get started. Sound like a plan? Let’s get started!

Do You Really Need Email Marketing?

Before we dive into why you might—or might not—want to hire an email marketing agency, let’s first take a moment to stop and talk about whether or not you should even be investing in email marketing. I mean, isn’t email marketing a fossil from the dinosaur days of online marketing? (yeah, it’s only been around for a few decades, but at the rate that the digital industry evolves, that’s basically prehistoric times, right?).

While it might be old—relatively speaking—email marketing is perhaps the most proven and tested online marketing channel. Sure, it’s been around for over 40 years, but in that time it’s matured a lot. As a result, email marketing has become an incredibly effective way to market your business.

Still don’t believe me? Here are just a few statistics about email marketing:

• 72% of US adults prefer to hear from businesses via email.
• As mentioned before, every dollar you spend on a good email marketing campaign produces thirty-eight dollars.
• 80% of retail businesses believe that email marketing is their most effective channel for customer retention.
• On average, customers who buy something after seeing your email will spend 138% more than the rest of your customers.

To put it simply, your customers, leads and potential clients want to hear from you via email. They’re expecting it. In marketing, that’s what we call a “golden opportunity”. So, why miss out on all of that potential just because you don’t have time to figure things out on your own?

Hiring an email marketing agency is a great way to have your cake and eat it too—especially when you can’t afford to hire someone internally to manage your email marketing campaigns. For many businesses, it’s the cheapest, most effective way to get their email marketing campaigns headed in the right direction.

Why You Might Want to Hire an Email Marketing Agency

We’ve already touched on why you might to hire an email marketing agency to make sure your emails stand out in your customers’ inboxes.  But if you’re still not convinced, let’s take a closer look at 5 different reasons why investing in an email marketing agency might be the right move for your business.

1. It’s Too Hard

On the surface, email marketing seems easy. Most of us write emails every single day, so it shouldn’t be that hard to put together an email marketing campaign, right?

Wrong.

Sure, you can throw together an email and send it out to your subscribers, but don’t be surprised if you don’t get very good results. Writing a marketing email is very different from writing a personal or even a business email. Even campaigns that seem “simple” are usually the end result of a lot of thought and effort.

To be honest, most people aren’t writers and most writers aren’t great email marketers. Unfortunately, putting together an effective email takes a good deal of know-how and skill that you may not have.

Could you figure it out for yourself? Probably, but do you have the time to figure out a complex new skill set? Maybe not.

If writing isn’t your thing or you don’t have hundreds of hours to invest into learning how to do email marketing, you can shortcut the whole process by simply hiring an experienced email partner to help you out. You’ll get faster and better results, so why deal with the headache yourself?

2. You’re Getting Poor Results

Given what we just discussed, it shouldn’t a surprise that many businesses struggle to get that 38x return-on-investment. Why? It’s not because email marketing doesn’t work for their company—it’s because they don’t really know what they’re doing.

There are all kinds of reasons why emails don’t perform, and if you’re fairly new to email marketing, you may feel like you’re stumbling around in the dark.

A good email marketing agency, on the other hand, has seen it all. They’ve worked with countless clients and have an entire tool chest of skills and knowledge that can help them maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns. Headlines, pre-headers, calls-to-action and more—they know how to use all of this to drive the results you need.

3. You’re Wasting Time and Money

Unless you already have a strong background in email marketing, most of your time—or whichever employee you’ve asked to run your email marketing—early on will be spent on learning, tweaking and figuring things out. So, not only will your emails be less effective, you’re also paying yourself or someone else to learn.

That can be a pricey investment right from the get-go.

Since you’re not adding an extra expense, it may not feel like as big of an investment as hiring an email marketing agency, but there’s definitely an opportunity cost to figuring out email marketing. And it can be a steep one.

However, if you hire an email marketing agency, you don’t have invest money into the learning curve. Your agency can jump straight into delivering results, which may actually save you time and money.

4. All You Can Do Is Keep the Lights On

If you do it right, email marketing takes time. Unfortunately, most marketers and marketing teams are already swamped, so adding a time-intensive task like email marketing to their plate means that something has to give. And, often, that means that your email marketing strategy doesn’t get the time it needs to succeed.

To make matters worse, if it’s all you or your team can do to simply get your regular newsletter out, that means you aren’t doing the things that will really allow your email marketing to thrive.

Personalization. Segmentation. Testing. Automation. Scoring. Email drips. These email marketing tactics (and more) can take your campaigns from okay to amazing, but they can take a lot of dedicated time and energy to get set up properly. An email service agency, however, can take care of all of that for you, allowing you and your marketing team to focus on what they’re good at.

5. You’re Spending Too Much Time in the Trenches

If you’re a business owner, you know your business better than anyone else. If you’re a marketing director, you’ve got the vision for your brand and sales strategy. That’s where you should be focusing your time and efforts—not on the nitty-gritty of building out individual drip campaigns.

When you spend too much time implementing your own strategy, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. You get so caught up in the details that you have a hard time keeping things headed in the right direction.

That’s a serious problem.

Hiring an email marketing agency can free you up to stay focused on the things that really matter. To make things even better, a good email services agency can even provide strategic and tactical input and suggestions that will help you do your job better. It puts you in the driver’s seat—where you belong—while still ensuring that what needs to be done, gets done (the right way).

Conclusion

In short, if you want to do email marketing right and don’t have the internal resources you need, hiring an email marketing agency can be one of the best decisions you can make for your business. Most companies can’t afford to hire a full-time email marketing specialist, but they can afford an email marketing agency.

And, with the kind of results that an effective email marketing strategy can provide, it’s an investment that can produce massive returns.

By the way, if you’d like to see what a good email marketing agency can do for your business, let us know here or in the comments. We’d love to make email marketing one of the best parts of your online marketing strategy.

Have you ever hired an email marketing agency? What was your experience like? Have any tips or advice to share? Leave your thoughts in the comments.